


Before the Shield, Behind the Bullet

by Regency



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Alternate Universe, Community: comment_fic, Dark, M/M, old fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-11
Updated: 2012-03-11
Packaged: 2017-11-01 19:11:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/360262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Regency/pseuds/Regency
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a life where Spencer Reid left Quantico before completing his training, Gideon is far too close to see the damage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Before the Shield, Behind the Bullet

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt placed at the end to keep from spoiling the surprise.

" _If thus the young hours have fleeted,_  
When sorrow itself look'd bright;  
If thus the fair hope hath cheated,  
That led thee along so light;  
If thus the cold world now wither  
Each feeling that once was dear -  
Come, child of misfortune, come hither,  
I'll weep with thee, tear for tear."

Elle read the image of the typewritten keepsake aloud as it scrolled into view. "He has a love of literature," she pointed out unnecessarily. It had been left at the scene of the first crime and each preceding stanza had faced a similar, subsequent fate.

"18th century poetry: Thomas Moore," Hotch detailed precisely, sounding no more heartened than she.

"I take it we don't have any 18th century English majors in the room," Gideon posed to the team, only partly in jest. Another time he could have used Spencer's help, he refused to reach for him. This case had the potential to wreak too much havoc within the younger man. His mother's untimely death was still too near. Gideon had found him just last night lost within the brittle pages of Marjorie Kemp— _one of her minor works_ , he'd called it—though he could recite the passages flawlessly from memory. No, he could not venture into these depths; he might, yet, not return.

"Don't look at me," JJ said when their eyes seemed to shift to her. "Communications all the way."

Morgan covered his face with his hands and groaned in remembrance. "I hated English Lit. Interp was the worst part of that class. I could write the papers and debate the finer points of theme and characterization, but I never knew what the hell they were talking about."

"No one does," Gideon replied. "That's why it's open to interpretation." He stood up and wandered around the conference room table to stretch his legs. "They haven't lived in hundreds of years. The subject has absolutely nothing to do with the writers' original intent. It's about what _we_ want to use their words to say."

"Which begs the questions," Hotch followed, picking up his train of thought. "Why this poem and why backwards?"

Morgan threw up his hands, exasperated. "Why not?"

~!~

Gideon had made it a point in this brief romantic dance they'd done to keep his work separate from their relationship. He didn't bring case files home with him if he could help it. If he had to, they remained locked in his briefcase until the wee hours of the morning, when Spencer slept and years of work like this ensured that Gideon never could.

He did it not because he distrusted Spencer, but to protect him—and to protect the victims. They deserved to have their dignity preserved as much as Spencer deserved to keep his innocence intact. The things that filled these innocuous-looking manila folders were anything but harmless.

It was simply hard enough to sleep without the ravages of humanity keeping up the person beside him. Gideon was desperate for that separation; he needed the reprieve that huddling, exhausted, next to his other brought. Spencer was good; imperfect but determined, kind but not cloying. He was a human being touched by madness and, yet, unoffended.

He was good and he kept at bay the bad. It was a wonder, Gideon often thought, that he'd gotten away from the FBI so easily. That was how they'd met.

Spencer Reid, the FBI's most sought-after trainee and holder of three PhD's, had had enough. His fellow cadets were aggravating, his instructors antagonistic; and, the work hadn't been stimulating enough to compensate for the environment. He'd already made the decision to leave the Academy when he heard that Jason Gideon was coming to give a talk on psychological profiling. Given Gideon's reputation in the field, he'd decided to stick around long enough to attend. So, he had and the rest was recent history. Or so he'd always said to Gideon.

He was young and still, even to Gideon, appeared frail, but he had an innate wisdom that had prompted to older man to give him a chance. He'd asked an astute question, stayed behind to get a detailed response, and been invited out for a drink before the end of the conversation. As Gideon had walked away from the eventual former trainee, he got the sense that he'd been handled, that he'd done exactly what Spencer had wanted him to do. Oddly enough, he hadn't minded at the time.

He still didn't mind so much. Spencer made few demands on his limited time and asked little in the ways of affection. He seemed content with what intimacies they shared: reading, lecturing, discussing—and, of course, sex. Their relationship was fulfilling on nearly every level. In so many ways, they were the same.

Spencer had a gift for psychological profiling, a gift for gathering the disparate elements of _modus operandi_ and, out of them, composing motive. He was brilliant and Gideon often found himself relying on his keen insight during cases. He didn't share the details of specific investigations and he never asked, but he listened as Spencer puzzled out the top stories in morning paper or on the evening news. There was always something in his eyes, a pen in hand, a foreign spark that set him off. He didn't ask, he didn't inquire; he didn't have to. There was something to this man and Gideon had long ago come to regret not encouraging him to stay on at Quantico.

He had always treasured Spencer's clarity of thought. There were times when his theories about criminal cases in the media mirrored Gideon's perfectly. On those occasions, Gideon felt especially confident about the direction the investigation was taking. Other times, Spencer seemed lost in the particulars himself. He didn't delve into the stinking crevices of humanity for a living anymore, but he was fascinated by it as a calling. Times like those, Gideon feared that he'd wake up one day to find a reflection of himself where Spencer's sanity used to be. That was why he didn't sleep.

That was why he now turned off the television before the evening news began.

Gideon had lost many things; he was not prepared to lose Spencer.

~!~

"He's fascinated, perhaps even obsessed with the mentally deficient," Gideon droned aloud, more to himself than the team assembled around him. "He targets them, but he shows no malice in their deaths." He looked up at Morgan. "He's never used more than necessary force."

Morgan sat up in his chair and shuffled through the crime scene photos spread out on the desk. He picked up a couple, giving them a shake for emphasis. "Sometimes, it seemed that near-lethal force was all he was capable of."

"Not necessarily," Hotch supplied from his place beside the corkboard. "He wouldn't have undertaken this…mission if he thought he lacked the physicality to follow through. He's too intelligent, too organized to risk everything on a foolhardy venture. He wouldn't have underperformed—unless he wasn't sure he wanted to commit the crimes." Distracted, he came to rest on the edge of the table. "He hesitated to use excessive force because he was ambivalent about committing the offense."

"That doesn't make sense," Gideon offered, slumping back in his chair. "An unsub commits a crime out of malice, desire, or to satisfy a compulsion. Why would the unsub show remorse in the midst of the act and, yet, not before?"

Elle Greenaway, seated to the left of Hotch's empty chair, proposed a theory. "Maybe before he hurts them, it feels like an act of mercy. He thinks he's treating what ails them, that anything—even death—is better than their current existence. But, once he's begun committing the act and once it's over, he can no longer pretend that his intentions were altruistic."

"At that point, he has become as destructive a force as the demons he sought to exorcise. He is the illness," Hotch concluded.

Morgan shook his head. "But he thinks he's the cure."

 _It's an endless cycle_ , Gideon mused and closed his eyes to think. _The sorrow that won't stop._

"Maybe that explains the reverse order of the stanzas. It could be a reference to personal experience," Hotch posited. "Mental illness is rarely perpetual. It's a descent. That means there was a time before it reached a crisis point. He began at the end,…" he trailed off, turning his eyes to Gideon.

"Because that means the worst is over," Elle answered instead and Hotch nodded.

Gideon came to the expected conclusion: "He's trying to return to better days."

For that, he almost had to pity the unsub. Apparently only the sane knew there was no going back.

_Has Hope, like the bird in the story,_  
That flitted from tree to tree  
With the talisman's glittering glory -  
Has Hope been that bird to thee?  
On branch after branch alighting,  
The gem did she still display,  
And, when nearest, and most inviting,  
Then waft the fair gem away? 

~!~

Spencer didn't go to sleep that late night. He sat up in the wee hours and he wrote. He filled pages with his frantic musings. His introspection seemed as endless as his sleeplessness. Gideon had come to find him a time, or two, or four. He seemed desperate at his task, paging through texts on shelves and passing Gideon often in a daze.

The agent didn't ask, but he observed, his mental gears turning in search of explanation. In spite of his youth, Spencer was a practitioner of strict personal control. He spoke in measured tones even when at a loss for how to connect with his audience. He eschewed fidgeting, pacing, and other indications of discomfiture. Except now, he was a veritable sideshow of aggravation in motion. He couldn't be still and, for some reason, Gideon was resistant to intervening.

He had long ago stowed away his case file and taken to noting Spencer's ire. He muttered softly to himself, words in Latin and in Greek. Roots, origins, mathematical proofs. The Fibonacci sequence was recurring. Then, there were the names. _Kemp, Moore, Dickinson, Yeats._ On and on.

He finally settled down with a copy of his mother's favorite book. He didn't read it but he touched the pages. Words he whispered found no match among the fiction in his hands.

" _Has love to that soul, so tender,_  
like our Lagenian mine,  
Where sparkles of golden splendour  
All over the surface shine -  
But, if in pursuit we go deeper,  
Allured by the gleam that shone,  
Ah! false as the dream of the sleeper,  
Like Love, the bright ore is gone."

Gideon stood before he thought to stand and pulled the book out of Spencer's hand. He kissed him, then, until he forgot about poetry and his frenzy switched from mania to lust. He yanked his shirt from his shoulders and thought of cancelling his cable in the morning. He took him on the couch with the evening edition crushed underneath them.

His sanctuary was unraveling and he feared that what had been good might no longer be.

~!~

Gideon didn't think to say hello when he entered the bullpen. He had pressing concerns, more pressing than the investigation dictated. There were cracks in the veneer of the dam, gaping holes beginning to appear. He needed to seal them if he could, maintain the integrity of the separation. It was disintegrating.

"JJ, you need to put a full lid on this case. Nothing about the profile goes out. It's incomplete. I don't want to hear about books from a reporter, much less about Moore in the press. You got me?"

The media liaison appeared momentarily stunned, but she moved to act after a second's delay. "Yes, sir."

She was gone and he was left with one nauseating certainty: nothing had gone out. This poem was their ace in the hole and they'd played it close to the vest from the start. His reaction was an overreaction and too late.

There was something wrong, very wrong, and there had always been.

_A final psychological evaluation would likely have revealed any sign of acute schizophrenia. Any obvious signs of mental illness or defect._

He moved on autopilot to his office to stow his things. He followed Spencer's lead and paced. He covered the free dimensions of his floor space. He handled tokens and souvenirs, over his lifetime collected. He fingered the spines of beloved books, some given as gifts and some purchased as rewards for a job adequately done. On the corner of his desk, where things were forgotten in his daily grind, lay another book. He'd read it page for page and remembered snippets in the aftermath. Its giver had left a greater impression than its contents.

While he had a love of etymology and the world of literature as a whole, he had no particular affinity for poetry. In epics he found that poets sacrificed precision for style. In sonnets, they favored brevity over clarity. For his part, he desired everything. He could fill in the blank slates between lines and letters, could determine for himself their motivations or their causes. When he sat down to part the leather sheaths of a book, he wanted all his expectations met with motives assured. He read people by profession; sometimes, however, he'd simply like to read a story, not translate one. For that reason, his appreciation of the art had always been limited.

Gideon was a connoisseur of whole things. He attracted things intact that he could cherish or fractions of them that he could fix. He couldn't always make them whole again and they couldn't always be saved, but they were attracted just the same.

The danger came when he could no longer tell if all of the pieces he held in his hands were all of the pieces there were.

~!~

Gideon repeated to himself first inglorious stanza of the poem as he walked into his home. He could hear Spencer breathing easy. The younger man was calm, not anxious. When he came into the living room to look at him, he wasn't perspiring. Spencer gave him one inscrutable look before he returned his previous task.

"Literature is the gateway," Spencer told him as he paged through Kemp yet again, from the end. "You read the books to get a grasp on the reality of the age, to be given a full picture free of grammatical and metric constraint. Books, novels and non-fiction, are a great way to begin to understand the world and the time. But it's poetry—" He smiled dimly and looked away. "—that tells you that you've arrived."

"Why did you start at the end of the poem?" Gideon asked. Spencer had reached the opening cover once more and turned back to the last page, where Gideon spied a faded piece of stationery scribbled with splotched ink.

"My mother always told me that to understand where your protagonist begins, you must endeavor to understand their end." He traced the words just out of Gideon's line of sight. His fingertips came away smudged with blue. "I began with the end because that was all we had. ' _Too fast have those young days faded / That, even in sorrow, were sweet?'_ " he quoted, his voice gingerly enveloping the oft-recited text. "Even when she was lost—when she couldn't discern me from the voices or they from me, she was my mother. She _is_ my mother and she was a prisoner my entire life." He laughed with no particular humor. "A life sentence."

"I'm sorry she died, Spencer," Gideon ventured. He'd known the pain when it first appeared, but he'd reckoned its depth with a dearth of accuracy. It ran far deeper than he'd anticipated and the crack was larger, nearly cleaving the man himself in two. _Perhaps it already had,_ he presumed.

"I'm not sorry," Spencer retorted, shutting the book and holding it to his chest. "I'm not." He smiled widely, an expression wildly incongruous with his natural state. The sadness was there, lining his eyes and tightening his jaw, but the joy was genuine. "She isn't trapped anymore. It was the kindest thing anyone could have done." The sadness became greater then, the joy lesser.

" _A girl arose that had red mournful lips_  
And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,  
Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships  
And proud as Priam murdered with his peers…."

"Yeats," Gideon guessed. Spencer nodded, chin tucked into his chest, the book cradled as fiercely as a lost love. Gideon remained standing, his sidearm akin to a cinderblock at the small of his back. He could have taken a seat now, but he knew that there was a S.W.A.T. Team outside waiting for the all clear. If he sat there'd be no refuge, if he rested there'd be no shelter. Spencer would die before he could say so much as, "Hold your fire."

He was a monster, but Gideon had been the one damned. He couldn't let go.

"Did you kill her?" he asked when he was down to wasting time. Hotch's voice was in his ear, ever calm but urgent. He needed the all-clear that Gideon couldn't give. The personal weapon that he kept sat on the coffee table, waiting.

Spencer looked up at him, seemingly surprised at the question. He furrowed his brow. "Of course not. She was my mother."

"You killed four other people." It made him nauseous even to think it. He had shared his life and his bed with the unsub for months. He was still half in denial and half in hell and, yet he couldn't resist being relieved that Spencer hadn't sunk to matricide.

"I…paroled them," he murmured, nodding. He seemed content with his characterization of events. He caressed the places where the cover's painted embossing was fading with his fingertips, seeming more upset about that than this.

"You took their lives away, Spence. Just like someone took your mother's."

The younger man shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut as if to build a wall between, to construct a separation. "No, that's not what she said. She talked to me. She told me she was happier now, better now. She read me…Chaucer." He traced the leafing of the book, his lips trembling under the strain. "They made her better." He seemed to desperately hope.

"They made her dead, Spencer," he reminded him with gentleness he didn't deserve.

"No," Spencer rebutted. He was resisting the truth, because to acknowledge it was to acknowledge his part in it, his actions. It was too late for that. He'd done too much. A man destined for justice had become a different man indeed.

"Not better, not normal. Dead!" Gideon said, because it needed to be said.

"No!" Spencer sprang back from the table and stalked away. He clung to his mother's book and little else. He paced and clung and pleaded. But he didn't plead out loud. He pleaded with the very face and absent smile that had brought them together. He'd been falling apart even then.

Gideon had been too blinded by his admiration and eventually by deeper-running emotions to see that the devil he sought was the devil he knew. Now, he was in hell completely. There was no way out.

_Has sorrow thy young days shaded,_  
As clouds o'er the morning fleet?  
Too fast have those young days faded  
That, even in sorrow, were sweet?  
Does Time with his cold wing wither  
Each feeling that once was dear? -  
Then, child of misfortune, come hither,  
I'll weep with thee, tear for tear. 

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the comment_fic [prompt](http://community.livejournal.com/comment_fic/75615.html?thread=17568351#t17568351): Criminal Minds, Reid/author’s choice, instead of joining the FBI he became one of the people they hunt. Longer than your standard comment. Yep, I did it again.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own any characters recognizable as being from Criminal Minds. They are the property of their respective producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun. Neither do I own "Has Sorrow Thy Young Days Shaded" by Thomas Moore or "Sorrow of Love" by William Butler Yeats.
> 
> If you guys wanna talk/flail/flop with me on Tumblr, I'm [sententiousandbellicose](http://sententiousandbellicose.tumblr.com).


End file.
